According to reports from various industry sources, the Chinese government has begun the process of picking a national computer chip instruction set architecture (ISA). This ISA would have to be used for any projects backed with government money — which, in a communist country such as China, is a fairly long list of public and private enterprises and institutions, including China Mobile, the largest wireless carrier in the world. The primary reason for this move is to lessen China’s reliance on western intellectual property. Link

The vast majority of North Korean surfers have never actually seen the Web. At libraries and educational facilities, they log on to something called Kwangmyong (roughly translated as “bright”). It’s been around since the early 2000s and it’s a completely closed intranet system, operating via fiber optic cable. It most likely has no more than a few dozen sites, most of them for education or propaganda. Link